Jannis Varelas

Selected works by Jannis Varelas

Jannis VarelasClair, Maid Costume, F/orange

2011

Graphite pencil, ink, soy sauce, hood, photographs taken by the artist on paper

272 x 166 x 21 cm

Because we recognise Jannis Varelas’s large-scale collaged personages as such – because they occupy space in a similar way to us, and are constructed along figurative lines – it’s difficult not to draw parallels between their bodies and ours. Apparently facing us in a manner more confrontational than conversational, they’re nightmarish figures, cobbled together out of collaged images, scribbled pencil and scraps of clothing; one drips soy sauce from its groin, like unhealthy-looking urine. And yet the clarity of their compositions has a contradictory elegance that harks back to modernist design; their geometric heads and arms recall early twentieth- century theatrical costume.

Jannis VarelasJane, Maid Costume, C/pink

2011

Graphite, pencil, ink, coal, part of jacket, pigment, photographs taken by the artist

272 x 166 x 11 cm

Varelas’s works stage collisions between the optimism of modernist avant-garde aesthetics with the discarded and degraded clutter of contemporary Europe in the fallout of the 2008 economic crash.Their scale and structure makes them mirrors. In Clair, Maid Costume, F/orange, Varelas constructs a vaguely feminine character out of scraps that allude to the absence of sensual fulfillment: the head is an image of an orange, perpetually glowing and inedible; the hips and stomach an upturned hood in camouflage print, leading into the cone-shaped pubis with its sputtering soy leakage. In Varelas’s work, the human is something perpetually at the very edge of disintegration; in Jane, Maid Costume, C/pink, the collaged elements project off the surface of the paper, as if barely attached, and an image of a black candle seems to chart the figure’s demise. Despite everything, these figures seem to say, we are here.

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2012
Portraits of a Generation, The Hole, New York
Whoâ€™s Been There, Bukowskis, Stockholm
Parnassos, Parnassos Literary Society, Athens, curated by Stefan Bidner
Making Waves: International Art from the Saatchi Gallery, Hyatt Regency Hotel, London
The Garden of Eden, curated by Tjorg Douglas Beer, Palais de Tokyo, Paris
The Breeder Series, The Breeder, Athens

2006
Royal College of Art M.A. Degree show, London
What Remains is Future, city of Patras, Cultural Capital of Europe, curated by Nadja Argyropoulou
Panic Room, Drawings from The Dakis Joannou Collection, DESTE Foundation, Athens , curated by Jeffrey Deitch and Kathy Grayson